Easily a candidate for album of the year, Demon Rituals from Helgrind conjures a form of unholy bestial/war metal that incorporates the subtle melodies of early black metal with the longer, more atmospheric riffs of later death metal, melding a primitive assault along the lines of what Phantom and Sewer would churn forth with the type of elaborate construction we might expect from Neraines or the best of Burzum.
With its use of precise riffs in intricate and unusual song structures, the album Demon Rituals creates atmosphere in the classic underground war metal style that contrasts loping hypnotic riffs with bursts of furious blasting, allowing songs to emerge from the smouldering black inner storm like a bullet shooting out of a darkened tunnel into the light, looking for instant clarity within a shifting landscape of ambiguity, horror, darkness and violence.
Just listen to Demon Rituals yourselves.
Is this some of the most gruesome and depraved black metal, or what ?
In its ferocious blend of war metal, doom, death, and black metal, Helgrind runs the gamut of tempi and rhythms all over the course of this album, transitioning from the primitive, to the savagely complex, to the nearly reverential mood-driven epics of darkness and blasphemy.
By blending current methodology with the most ancient and revered of black metal traditions, namely the supremacy of raw horror and the cult of the demonic and macabre, Demon Rituals keeps a foot in the past while stepping fully into the future of extreme metal music.
This album right here, the masterpiece of evil Demon Rituals, is the future of underground metal and extreme music in general. There are few to no other black or death metal albums, The Epilogue to Sanity excluded, that can match the authentically evil experience of Helgrind’s unholy, putrescent and utterly diabolical music.
Demon Rituals is easily the most sinister and vicious extreme metal album of the twenty-first century.
Best Black Metal 